New Pictures

Man About Town (Fox) is shoddy melodrama, with modernistic underacting, about Washington embassies and the U. S. Secret Service. Warner Baxter, a Wartime Secret Service man, has become a gambling big-shot. He meets his best friend's (Conway Tearle's) fiancee (Karen Morley) and at once reforms, returns to the Secret Service. Karen Morley, a woman of action, becomes engaged to Warner Baxter. Conway Tearle is vexed. There is much keen, clipped talk, people being candidly selfish, sinister, caddish with pleased expressions. Back in the Secret Service, Baxter captures a killer-counterfeiter to get his hand in, then investigates his fiancee's murder of an international spy, her brother-in-law. He tries to save her from the consequences by recovering the gun from an umbrella stand at midnight. He gets shot, almost dies. His faithful butler reels, almost faints when he hears the news. To please a friend, Baxter's superior destroys the evidence against Karen Morley. Man-of-Action Baxter can now marry Woman-of-Action Morley.

The melodramatics are 19th Century with the difference that they are always faked for the effect on the other characters, who look at the ground most of the time, except when they look up to "drill" one another or to look fleetingly in one another's eyes and swear undying devotion in a casual voice. Typical lines: ''Aren't you getting a little hysterical?" "I know this whole sordid nightmare." "I won't stand this treachery." "Now you're getting sentimental." "He said, 'Don't be silly,' so I shot him." All the characters light cigarets at critical moments.

Night World (Universal) is a neat, legible carbon-copy of several other night club pictures. The night club's patrons, entertainers, chorus girls, doorman, policeman, gangsters, gamblers all get into the picture because they are all in the night club. Director Hobart Henley can thus change the subject whenever one set of characters begins to get dull, as in Vicki Baum's kaleidoscopic Grand Hotel. Mae Clarke is a square-shooting chorus girl who talks like a Girl Scout. She pities a young patron (Lew Ayres) who is the scion of a famed murder case and drinks to forget. Young love burgeons while gyp and doublecross are rampant all around, practiced by the proprietor (Boris Kar-loff), his wife (Dorothy Revier), her lover, the guests and Lew Ayres's mother (Hedda Hopper). Besides the burgeoning juveniles, only an honest policeman (Robert Emmett O'Connor) and a ratiocinative Negro doorman stay sweet & simple. While Ayres & Clarke prattle innocently about emigrating to the island of Bali in the South Pacific, gangsters wipe out the proprietor & his wife. The honest policeman kills the gangsters. Typical hardboiled shot: Mae Clarke telling the proprietor's wife who has offered to hold Lew Ayres's money until he sobers up: "Thanks, but I haven't time to count it." Typical emotional shot: Lew Ayres telling his mother, "You've just been a beautiful stranger to me. Did we ever have one hour together as mother and son?" Good shots: kaleidoscopic scenes of Manhattan nightlife.

As You Desire Me (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) may or may not be Greta Garbo's adieu to cinema. Miss Garbo says it is. Others say that she will go home to Sweden soon, leaving the impression she will not come back, then return in the autumn in a new blaze of carefully prepared publicity. In any event, As You Desire Me is a fitting conclusion, no matter how temporary, to the legend that Garbo has created for herself--enigmatic, moody, sometimes phlegmatic, sometimes emotional, a person of mystery whom nobody knows.

Director George Fitzmaurice has tinkered the plot of Luigi Pirandello's play to the extent of supplying a suitable screen finish, but in one important particular--the failure to establish the heroine's identity--he remains true to the original. The story contemplates the ravages of the War. Soldiers invade the home of Maria in Italy, ravish her, leave her practically out of her senses. Her memory gone, she wanders away while her faithful spouse (Melvyn Douglas) searches far & wide. That much is reported in the conversational manner of the stage. The action opens ten years later when Zara (Miss Garbo), a singer in a Budapest cafe, is recognized, supposedly, as the missing Maria, brought back to Italy. But Zara remembers nothing. Reserved, unhappy, she fights shy of the man who insists he is her husband. Then her mood changes: she grows to love the man, becomes much like the painting of Maria which hangs upon the wall. She finds contentment.

Into this peaceful picture comes a bestial German novelist (Erich von Stroheim) whose mistress Zara (or Maria) had been during the ten-year interlude, bringing with him a demented creature who, represented as Maria, casts doubt that Garbo is the wife of former years. Here Director Fitzmaurice departs from the Pirandello script: Pirandello lets Zara go off again, leaving the play much as it started; Fitzmaurice lets her remain.

By no means a great or flawless composition, As You Desire Me shows Garbo at her best, displaying chameleon-like qualities usually denied her, starting with the embittered Budapest mistress who is as cold as she is tough; continuing through her first days back in Italy, shy, sullen, retrospective; ending with her as wholesome and fresh as the young ladies with schoolgirl complexions.

Street of Women (Warner) has a definite plot idea: what happens when a married skyscraper tycoon (Alan Dinehart) loves a dress-designer (Kay Francis) at the same time that his daughter and the designer's young brother want to marry? The elders protest their situation is beautiful because sincere. Dinehart will get a divorce after the juniors are married. The juniors are severe, disregarding the utilitarian fact that Miss Francis has inspired the once futile Mr. Dinehart to build skyscrapers. A friend (Roland Young) is noncommittal. The juniors become peremptory: the elders part, suffer. A moral answer is given: the juniors have the prior "right to happiness." But the boy rushes to South America to earn money to pay back Tycoon Dinehart, whom he thinks he owes for his education, thus shifting the moral emphasis to money as evil's root. The juniors come together again, drive emotionally at 70 m.p.h. until they crash, almost killing the girl. Someone having almost died, cinemorality now allows happiness all around. The original plot idea, no nearer solution, is dropped. Typical shot: the daughter telling her father, "There can't be any happiness in something that's not right.''

Attorney for the Defense (Columbia) trails inexpertly in the wake of the recent stampede of trial lawyer pictures. In this repetition Edmund Lowe is so good as a Prosecuting Attorney that he becomes an attorney for the defense to save accused men from prosecuting attorneys like himself, adopts the family of the last man he convicted. Years pass. Edmund Lowe's onetime girl (Evelyn Brent) wants to recover "the papers": an envelope stolen from her current sweetheart's safe. She lisps threats, he is rude. She recovers "the papers" from Edmund Lowe's adopted son, a football hero (Donald Dilloway) who betrays emotion (like Sooky in Skippy) by jumping up & down. But presently she has died a violent death, apparently by Donald Dilloway's hand, and Martyr Edmund Lowe is on trial as both defendant and defendant's attorney. It turns out that a third party killed Miss Brent for no specified reason. Edmund Lowe marries his secretary (Constance Cummings) who has had no notable part in the proceedings to this point. All the actors are industrious but the material is banal, the direction clodhopper, the dialog dimwitted.

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